However, identifying the critical resources over pertinent temporal and spatial scales as well as the most relevant functional traits can be challenging. Researchers have advocated measuring diversity in functional attributes relevant to those critical limiting resources and assumed that this should be the best predictor of community productivity and ecosystem functioning –. One guiding assumption has been that greater diversity in functional traits allows species to access more of the total resources –, whether they be nutrients, water, pollinators or fungal symbionts, and allows multiple competing species to coexist. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.įor nearly two decades, researchers have tested the prediction that community productivity is positively related to plant diversity –. DT, JCB and the Cedar Creek experiments were supported by NSF/DEB0620652. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: For MWC, this work was conducted while a Postdoctoral Associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a Center funded by NSF (Grant #DEB-0553768), the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the State of California. Received: FebruAccepted: ApPublished: May 27, 2009Ĭopyright: © 2009 Cadotte et al. Freckleton, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Further, a statistical model that included the presence of a nitrogen fixer, seed weight and phylogenetic diversity was a better explanation of community productivity than other models.Ĭitation: Cadotte MW, Cavender-Bares J, Tilman D, Oakley TH (2009) Using Phylogenetic, Functional and Trait Diversity to Understand Patterns of Plant Community Productivity. Although most of these diversity measures provided significant explanations of variation in productivity, the presence of a nitrogen fixer and phylogenetic diversity were the two best explanatory variables. Here we use data from a long-term experiment (Cedar Creek, MN) and compare the extent to which productivity is explained by seven types of community metrics of functional variation: 1) species richness, 2) variation in 10 individual traits, 3) functional group richness, 4) a distance-based measure of functional diversity, 5) a hierarchical multivariate clustering method, 6) a nonmetric multidimensional scaling approach, and 7) a phylogenetic diversity measure, summing phylogenetic branch lengths connecting community members together and may be a surrogate for ecological differences.
0 kommentar(er)
